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MEMORIAL ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



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HINGHAM, 


OCTOBER 8, 


1875. 






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HORACE BINNEY SARGENT. 


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BOSTON: 




PRESS 


OF ROCKWELL AND CHURCHILL, 




No. 


39 ARCH STREET. 
1875. 





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With the respects Oj 

Horace Binney Sargent. 




MEMORIAL ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



HINGHAM, OCTOBER 8, 1875. 



HORACE BINNEY SARGENT. 



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BOSTON: 
PRESS OF ROCKWELL AND CHURCHILL, 

No. 39 ARCH STREET. 
1875. 



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MEMORIAL ADDRESS. 



" Sacred to liberty and the rights of mankind.'" 

Cut in imperishable stone over the graves at Lex- 
ington, these words, that we have often heard from 
John Albion Andrew's lips, are his best eulogy. 
Those lips, whose teachings were so ringing with 
the truth that their echo thrills the nation's ear, to- 
day, in all her purposes of vigorous honesty and 
peace, are dust. The earth of this old town holds to 
her mother heart all of him that could die. 

For years a little image of the flag that he de- 
fended has marked his grave. True hearts of friends 
and kindred, who have ever loved him, true hearts of 
soldiers, who have ever blessed him for the blessing 
which he gave to them when he sent them forth to 
fight for country, not for State, have let him" rest in 
peace, without the sound of hammer or chisel to mar 
his grand repose. The hour has come to raise a 
memorial of his resting-place and fame. A gallant 
regiment has reminded us of a duty to the future 
unperformed. 



Gifts from soldiers, gifts for regiments and bat- 
teries, gifts from sailors, make this a tribute of manly 
reverence. A crippled soldier's tearful words, ac- 
companying the single dime that left him penniless, 
proclaim a love like that which glorified the widow's 
mite, and was rewarded with the praise, " She hath 
given more than they all." 

With grateful hearts, the wedded service of land 
and sea, the army and the navy, now dedicate this 
monument to liberty and the rights of mankind. 

Because of Governor Andrew's distinctive qual- 
ities, not likely to be confused by history with those 
of any other statesman whom 'New England has 
produced, this memorial has received the form of a 
statuesque likeness of the man. The survivors of 
the regiments whose last farewells of home are 
welded with the memory of the massive figure, the 
youthful face, the cheerful smile, and the determined 
bearing of the great War-Governor of Massachusetts, 
as he stood on the granite steps of the State House, 
bidding us God-speed to the field, would recall that 
proud and tender memory. We would that our 
children's children should know him as we remember 
him, and learn to love him, too. 

In the garden cemetery of this ancient town, and 
by the side of his grave — for on it no " sad sepul- 
chral stone" should press — his statue looks upon the 



rising sim. Leader among the shadowy hosts of 
your beautiful and brave, who passed at his trumpet 
call through the agony of their glory, he stands 
advanced before the soldiers' monument. 

How fitting that this martyr to the eternal vigi- 
lance of Liberty should rest in the old town where 
the first signer of the Declaration of American Inde- 
pendence — John Hancock — opened his baby eyes! 
When, also, I remember that during the war of the 
rebellion, with its nights of vigil and its days bur- 
dened with all the civil duties of an executive ; seven 
inaugural and A^aledictory addresses, exhaustive of 
many subjects; thirteen veto messages, many of them 
with elaborate law arguments; ninety special mes- 
sages; the patient and critical, verbal as well as 
legal, examination and discussion of one thousand 
eight hundred and- fifteen acts and resolves; innu- 
merable speeches and addresses on many subjects 
and in many places ; all of these civil duties added to 
the overwhelming cares of a War-Minister, as well 
as ruler — in war time — when all the offices of the 
State House were overflow^ing with infinite inquiry, 
complaint and diplomacy that were involved in the 
rapid and constant recruitment of one hundred and 
sixty thousand men; the State House being like a 
camp with going and returning troops, — when I 
reflect on this, and remember, that during all these 



Titanic years of toil which were bearing Governor 
Andrew surely to his early grave, he still continued 
to perform his duty as Secretary of Father Taylor's 
little Bethel for Seamen — I feel gratified, as by a 
divine harmony, that John Albion Andrew, whom I 
reverently deem the most Christ-like of all war's 
ministers, should sleep in the same country graveyard 
where sleeps that old communion-bearing deacon of 
your church — that honest, stout old deacon — who, 
at the capitulation of Yorktown, by the order of his 
friend as well as commander, "Washington, received 
the sword of Cornwallis! Major-General Benjamin 
Lincoln, of the army of the Eevolution, and John 
Albion Andrew; twin patriots of the elder and the 
later time ! God grant them rest ! 

To me, this covenanter spirit, this union of con- 
science and claymore, of sword and gospel, is 
sublime. So, in the will and inventory of Myles 
Standish, the great Puritan Captain, are recorded 
" three muskets with bandaleros " and " three old 
Bybles." Armed thus with faith and courage, men 
are girded with the sword of the Spirit, and become 
the Luthers and Loyolas of mankind. 

That Gov. Andrew's ashes lie in the spot that he 
would choose, may be gathered from an address to 
his neighbors at Hingham. " How dear to my heart," 
he says, " are these fields, these hills, these spreading 



trees, this verdant grass, this sounding shore before 
you, where now for fourteen years, through summer 
heat, and sometimes through winter storms, I have 
trod your streets, rambled through your woods, 
sauntered by your shores, sat by your firesides, and 
felt the warm pressure of your hands." " Here, too, 
dear friends, I have found the home of my heart." 
" Here, too, I have first known a parent's joy and a 
parent's sorrow." If immortality imply conscious 
identity with all its higher sympathies, who can 
doubt that congenial bonds still hold his steady heart 
to spirits of "just men made perfect" — to those of 
whom the record of this town is full, and from whose 
pure career he was wont to draw " example high " — 
men like Peter Hobart, the first settled minister, now 
dead two centuries, and who was forbidden by the 
magistrates to preach at a wedding, " because he was 
a bold man and would speak his mind; " the earlier 
patriotic men of Hingham, who died in Indian, French 
and English wars; the later dead, on whom, by vale 
and hillside, sea and river, your solemn doors have 
hardly closed — your fathers, brothers, lovers, sons 
— all equalized by death, all lighted up alike by can- 
non flash, all fondly folded to the breast of mourning 
motherland? 

Life is worth nothing, if we cannot believe in the 



8 

possibility of such reunions, when the glories of life's 
night shine out. 

** Bathed in tlie rays of the great setting flame, 
Hesperus with the host of heaven came, 
And, lo ! creation widened in man's view. 

" Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed 
Within thy beams, O Smi ! or who could find. 
Whilst flower and leaf and insect stood revealed. 

That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind ? 
Why do we then shun death with anxious strife ? 
K light can thus deceive, wherefore not life ?" 

With the exception of the five intense years of 
Governor Andrew's executive career, the facts of his 
short life may be briefly stated. Ten years have 
passed since the war of the great rebellion ended; 
and eight, this month of October, 1875, since he died. 
Long years of labor, bringing a ripe harvest of pro- 
fessional, social and political renown, preceded that 
period of his life which covered this State with her 
mantle of glory. Yet he died October 30, 1867, at 
the age of forty-nine. 

He was born May 31, 1818, of an intelligent, re- 
fined and cultivated mother, whose maiden name was 
N^ancy Greene Pierce, and whose ancestral family 
gave one President to the United States. The Gov- 
ernor's father, Jonathan Andrew, of South Windham, 



Maine, was of Anglo-Saxon stock, settled for at least 
four generations in Massachusetts. John Albion 
Andrew graduated at Bowdoin College in 1837, with 
sufficient evidence that those best judges, his college 
mates, appreciated his talents. He studied law with 
Hon. Henry H. Fuller; and he was married Decem- 
ber 25, 1848, to Miss Eliza Jones Hersey, a descend- 
ant of one of the oldest families of Hingham. 

From a charming temper and surroundings his 
childhood seems full of happiness. Through life 
there was no loss of power by friction. Carbon has 
been well defined as " stored-up sunlight." And 
when we see the civil and military engines of ■ a great 
Commonwealth moved for five years, with a power 
that astonished all her sister States and the world, by 
the mature energies of a man whose youth delighted 
in poetry, cheerful pursuits and the innocent pleas- 
iu*es of life, and whose whole career was love and 
charity to his fellow-men, we feel the beauty of an 
apt illustration, presented by the Reverend Elias 
Nason, in a felicitous memorial address before the 
;N^ew England Historic Genealogical Society, of 
which Governor Andrew, in addition to his other 
occupations, was president: "What impels that 
locomotive engine? " said the celebrated Stevenson to 
the Dean of Westminster one day. "Steam, to be 
sure, sir." — " ^o," replied the great inventor, " it is 



10 

the sunbeam God sent into the flowers." Mr. Nason 
rightly and eloquently adds these words in regard to 
Governor Andrew's " golden temper," that " it was 
the sunshine God sent into Mr. Andrew's happy 
heart that bore him through the battle-march of 
life." 

It is not my intention to follow him through the 
labors that preceded his executive career. Our mon- 
ument is to the War-Governor of Massachusetts. 
His reputation, as a sound and able lawyer, was 
confirmed before the war. His powers of wit, and 
logic, and eloquence were recognized. His moral 
daring was established. His political sympathies 
were open as the day. He was known to be an 
honest, dauntless, prompt and dangerous antagonist. 
And yet his advance into the fore-front of a debate 
where armies were the arguments, was so sudden, 
that he seemed instantly and constantly to grow 
beyond the world's opinion of his powers. "The 
"Word," " The Thought," " The Power," " The Act," 
were developed as in the Study scene of Faust. 

I feel that my only claim to speak to you of Gov- 
ernor Andrew to-day is that I once humbly served 
and ever after loved him. I would not extravagantly 
praise him. I would crave your permission to give 
my own measures of a man whose moral and intel- 
lectual altitude of political intuition dwarfed, to my 



11 

judgment, all his contemporaries, except Abraham 
Lincoln. Their trust in human nature, a trust 
which, in Governor Andrew at least, seemed to be 
the corollary of faith in God, gave them both pro- 
phetic insight. Both believed that one man, with the 
right, is a majority. 

This faith, which in Governor Andrew's case had 
the true dogmatism of inspiration, gave his courage a 
healthy color. By this bold trust he saved Washing- 
ton. On a memorable morning, when the first tele- 
gram for immediate aid had come, the State House was 
up in arms. The Adjutant GeneraFs office was over- 
flowing. The rotunda was like a barrack. Rosters 
were examined to find the readiest troops for instant 
movement. The selections of detached and dislo- 
cated companies were nearly made, when, as the 
Governor was entering Doric Hall with an aide, the 
sharp words, " Colonel ! won't the Governor send 
us ? We want to go." — " What regiment? " — " The 
Sixth." — "Where is it? " — "Lowell and towns round 
about." — "When can you start?" — " 1!!^ ine o'clock 
to-morrow," — caught the Governor's attention. He 
questioned the Adjutant, who was earnestly pleading 
for his regiment. But few words passed. The 
Adjutant General was notified; and "the Sixth" 
received the first baptism of blood! Farragut could 



12 



not have decided more promptly than this civihan 
who was first called to the helm in a hurricane. 

Governor Andrew was as independent of favor as 
he was of fear. He had the excellent quality of 
resistance to the improper solicitation of those to 
whom he not only owed a part of his advancement, 
but whose sympathies were his own. In a memo- 
rable week in 1861, when the so-called conservative 
hostility to John Brown and his supporters was at a 
white heat, and violence was imminent, the Governor 
was earnestly solicited to preside at a meeting in 
honor of John Brown; that the executive presence 
might deter the mob from outrage. The solicitation 
was fervid and eloquent. In the evening that pre- 
ceded the meeting at which his assistance was 
requested, the Governor, with a single staff otficer, 
went by appointment to give a final answer to the 
request. A small but solemn conclave of earnest 
men like himself awaited his coming. 

After kind greeting and hearing a few words from 
some of them, Governor Andrew spoke, wath as much 
emotion as comported with firmness, nearly as follows: 
" You know, my friends, how dear this cause of anti- 
slavery has been and is to my heart. You know how 
we have .hoped and prayed and toiled together. You 
know what I think of John Brown as a man, and how 
surely I believe that his memory as a martyr will 



13 

remain when constitutions shall be forgotten. You 
kaow how keenly I should feel reproach from you, 
my coadjutors, for any supposed recreancy to a cause, 
when official position, that I owe in great measure to 
my advocacy of it, gives me, as you think, power to 
serve it. But perhaps you do not feel as I feel, how 
much easier it is to inveigh against a public officer, 
when we are not responsible for the administration of 
his office, than it is to properly administer an office 
which is a trust for all the people of the State. With 
all sympathy with the anti-slavery cause, and believ- 
ing all that I have said of John Brown to be true, and 
with all affection and respect for you, I cannot, as a 
magistrate, so far forget the trust reposed in me by 
the Commonwealth as to expose her highest executive 
office to indignity and reproach by presiding at a 
meeting convoked to celebrate an act which I, as a 
lawyer, loiow is technically treason." 

Some doubting hearts in Maryland were brought 
into closer sympathy with him and the Federal cause 
by a report of this conference. We must recollect the 
intensity of his sympathies, the issue on which he had 
been elected, and the increasing public sentiment that 
no forbearance could prevent an irrepressible conflict. 

We must recollect all this if we would justly esti- 
mate his struggle and victory over himself. 

With the caution of a lawyer, all the zeal of a re- 



14 



former, and the fidelity of a patriot, he watched the 
blackening tempest that commenced in 1861. To 
rightly measure his caution and his courage we must 
reverse for fifteen years the wheel of time, and place 
ourselves by the side of the men and opinions of that 
day. 

It is with no disposition to wake again the feelings 
of that hour, that I recall this condition of opinion. 
A million of Americans, whether fighting under the 
diverse teachings of Webster or Calhoun, for State or 
Nation, have sealed with blood their patriotic faith hi 
that which each army respectively believed to be the 
supreme mother-land. Federal and Confederate 
soldiers have clasped each other's hands, and heaven's 
equal sunlight falls on every grave. We both did 
our best. God decided between us, and our strife is 
finished forever. 

But such a disposition to forget the past as would 
draw a veil over its facts, to the confusing of the 
clean-cut features of a historical character, would be 
both injustice and ingratitude. Happy would it be 
for us all, no doubt, if we could abolish the day of 
judgment. But the ultimate just decision of this 
world is a ghost that will never down. If days and 
weeks be false to it, years may be more true. And if 
years be barren, the patient centuries will wait till the 
historian shall clear away the dust, and, unlocking the 



15 



archives of some Simanea, bring the eternal truth to 
hght. If a supreme moral power rule the universe, 
statesmen, -big or little, must bear the penalty that 
history will impose and never remit, if in a momentous 
crisis of their country they have been found on the 
wrong side of the Lord. 

To the rising generation who hear of the War of 
the Great Rebellion, — who see in the State Capitol a 
marble statue of the Great War-Governor by the side 
of her victorious, battle-frayed standards ; to the 
young, who have seen Sumner buried by the State, 
and Lincoln wept by the world, — it is not easy to 
portray the moral courage of these men, or to give an 
idea of the social hostiHty and ridicule that assailed 
their opinions. A large number of patriotic and in- 
fluential citizens, with whom a favorite high-sounding 
phrase was "broad-statesmanship," honestly deemed 
all abolitionists to be traitors. Highly respectable 
patriots cut Charles Sumner in the street, and de- 
risively held up their hands at the uncouth name 
" Abe Lincoln." 

So probably the Roman knights and dames, who 
religiously attended public worship in the Pantheon, 
smiled at a spiritual delusion of the common people 
down somewhere in Judea, and shuddered at the 
wild and wicked vagaries of those whom Tacitus 
describes as "malefactors," known in the age of 



16 

Nero for " their vices and their sullen hatred of all 
mankind ; " as " miscreants," called " Christiani " 
from their ringleader, Christus, whom a former Ro- 
man Governor named Pontius Pilate had crucified. 
But to us who, eighteen centuries later, read that 
ringleader's words, "Blessed are the merciful," 
" Blessed are the pure in heart," it is as surprising 
to know that the philosophic historian, Tacitus, con- 
sidered the Christians " miscreants," as it will be for 
the future to^ learn from the files of old newspapers 
that the anti-slavery leaders were traitors and 
Charles Sumner a bad citizen. 

But it was at a time when many honest and patri- 
otic men thus thought of them that Governor Andrew 
took the executive chair. The opposition to him still 
wielded a great, though waning, social power. Re- 
spectable men did not entirely frown on the attempt 
of mobs to crush out anti-slavery discussion. The 
Southern railroads had been, for some time, with- 
drawing their rolling stock, to facilitate the transpor- 
tation of troops and w:ar material. The South in- 
tended that the northern section should furnish the 
field of battle, and that northern households should 
be divided among themselves. It was of infinite im- 
portance to us, on the other hand, if war must come, 
that the line of battle should be crowded to the 
Southern States. We were resting on a magazine. 



17 

which an accidental collision between free speech 
and mob law, in Boston, might explode into a domes- 
tic civil war at the North. Some men acted with 
criminal recklessness of the heart-breaking issue in- 
volved. Some acted pnsillanimoasly, with a criminal 
disregard of the Bill of Rights. To Governor An- 
drew belongs the honor, that during these long weeks 
of suspense before Sumter was battered, while he 
used, as Lord Bacon advises, the hundred eyes of 
Argus to watch, he was gettiiig in readiness the 
hundred arms of Briareus to strike. Diplomatic in 
avoiding any domestic collisions in Massachusetts, 
he held Magna Charta and all the rights that Anglo- 
Saxon liberty has won, dearer than peace. "With 
patient labor and constant prayer for light, and that 
the cup of trial might pass from him, the summons 
to repress a mob would have found him ready. He 
was prepared to do his whole duty as a Chief Magis- 
trate ; and would have exhausted the military power 
of the Commonwealth, under the light that was 
vouchsafed him at the solemn hour, leaving some- 
thing, trustingly, for God himself to do. We ma}^ 
well apply Goethe's grand words to John Albion 
Andrew in that hour : — 

'* No test or trial you evaded ; 

A helping God the helper aided." 
3 



18 

This was the secret of his composure on a mem- 
orable occasion in 1861, which was made the subject 
of legislative investigation under oath. If I dwell 
upon it, for a moment, it is because this was a turn- 
ing point in the history of liberty. When a riotous . 
mob, invading the undoubted right of free speech, 
threatened bloodshed in Boston, the municipal au- 
thorities stopped an indiscreet discussion, by closing 
the doors of a legal meeting in Tremont Temple. 
1^0 one, so familiar as Governor Andrew was with 
the history of the freedom of speech, as set forth by 
the great lawyers who cluster around the name of 
that martyr of English liberty, the first Lord St. 
Germains, could fail to see, in this act, " pernicious 
precedent." To avert it, the Governor promptly 
stated his readiness to call out the State trooj)s upon 
municipal requisition. Much as he dreaded domestic 
civil war, he cherished more the chartered rights of 
mankind. "Willing as he was to defend these, he re- 
spected all the forms of constitutional law. ISo en- 
treaty of lifelong friends, that he should intervene 
without the municipal requisition, prevailed. He 
acutely suffered; for he felt how sharply, through 
the impotence that our jealousy of the one-man power 
infuses into our statutes, liberty of speech had been 
stabbed. To comprehend the full measure of his 



19 

prudence, we must remember the hour: it was the 
dawn of civil war. 

The most terrible surprises — of peace — do not 
justify departure from the statute. Society must 
take the consequences of its own folly, in having 
divided among several the extraordinary powers and 
functions intended for great emergencies, when 
events, changing with the speed of a whirlwind, 
require such instantaneous choice of methods and 
simultaneous execution as can only exist in the judg- 
ment and will of the one-man power. But, when 
civil war is in the air, and the highest opinions are 
conflicting, the inherent right of revolution in the 
people imposes a correlative duty of promptness on 
a ruler. In our reverence for statutes and prece- 
dents, we cannot emphasize too strongly the first of 
the words immortalized at, Gettysburg — " Govern- 
me:nt of the people, by the people, for the people." 
A mob is neither for nor hy the peojole, and is no 
factor [in Government. The ruler who, when 
statutes fail to guide, or co-ordinates fail to act, 
promptly throws himself on the right of society to 
exist, will be a Jackson ; and he who hesitates will be 
a Buchanan — in history. In judging of Governor 
Andrew's claim to praise for patient prudence, we 
must remember that mobs existed; a sacred right, es- 
pecially dear to his sympathies, was invaded by a 



20 

force revolutionary; co-ordinates failed to use the 
powers at command; and civil war was in all the air. 

"With all his resolution, he had a most sensitive 
regard for human suffering and human life. Indeed, 
he held the last so sacred, that, in the memorable case 
of a convicted murderer, he came, more nearly than 
by any of his public acts, to incur the censure of his 
friends, that he forgot the words of the Bill of 
Eights: "The Executive shall never exercise the 
legislative or judicial powers or either of them . . 

. . to the end it may be a Government of laws 
and not of men." But he based his action on a then 
undecided point of law, and defended his opinion by 
an able argument, to show a defect in the conviction. 
He was not generally disposed to do over or undo 
the work of other departments; and often inveighed 
against the too frequent and slovenly manner in 
which a cruel burden was imposed by convictions, 
accompanied with recommendations to mercy and 
petitions for pardon. 

His tenderness, especially for soldiers and their 
families, was too marked to be forgotten. From the 
moment that he dispatched his well-known telegram, 
that the bodies of our soldiers slain in Baltimore be 
cared for "tenderly," he was, till their arrival, ner- 
vously excited. And when the story was told him, 
how tearful women clustered around the School- 



21 



street entrance of King's Chapel, in the vaults of 
which the bodies awaited identification; how one 
poor woman sank on the pavement floor; how others 
went away with streaming eyes, thankful that the 
dead were not their own; how others, afraid to trust 
their hearts to meet the test, gave us the photo- 
graphs, which, by the flickering light in the dark 
vault, we were to compare with the pale, discolored 
faces, — no one could doubt that John Albion An- 
drew was the tender father of the people. 

And yet, through all the grief and shame that 
attended oar first shock of arms, his high-hearted 
hope and cheerful ways inspired us all. His voice 
and laughter were a defiant cheer to fate. 

His sense of fun crops out even in grave discus- 
sions. One smiles, for instance, in reading a long law 
argument in a veto message to the Senate, "in rela- 
tion to Jurors," at his suggestion, that the returned 
bill might operate to exclude from that bulwark of 
liberty — the jury — as persons unfit to serve on 
juries "by reason of being engaged in pursuits made 
criminal by statute" — all who fish "out of season," 
or sell "nuts except by dry measure." 

Even on this occasion the memory of his witty 
words, laughter that was almost articulate with 
mirth, and his cheery shout of merriment at some 
pronounced absurdity, reminds me how much his 



99 



sunshine lightened labor in these early days of the 
rebellion; when matters were so hurried that the 
aides would folloAV the soldiers of moving regiments 
down the steps, to tighten some buckle of belt or 
knapsack, or to thrust percussion caps into the 
pocket ! In the offices, crammed to suffocation with 
every applicant and contrast — the charitable and the 
selfish, the sublime and the grotesque — there was 
food for mirth as well as sadness. There were sut- 
lers seeking an outfit; and saints with bandages and 
lint; English officers tendering their service, and our 
regulars giving good advice; inventors of new- 
fangled guns, pistols and sabres, only dangerous to 
their possessor, and which the inventors, to our great 
joy, threatened to sell to the Confederacy if we did 
not buy them; gentlemen far gone into consumption, 
desiring gentle horseback exercise in the cavalry; 
ladies, offering to sew for us; needle-women, begging 
us "not to let ladies take the bread from soldiers' 
wives;" philanthropists, telling us that Confederate 
workmen, in our arsenals, were making up cartridges 
with black sand instead of powder ; saddlers, propos- 
ing sole-leather cuirasses shaped like the top of a 
coffin; bands of sweet-eyed, blushing girls bringing 
in nice long night-gowns "for the poor soldiers," o:* 
more imaginative garments, "fearfully and wonder- 
fully made," redolent of patriotism and innocence. 



23 

embroidered with the Stars and Stripes, and too big 
for Goliath. 

Until the patriotic men and women of the State, 
with that noble friend of the soldiers, Mrs. Harrison 
Gray Otis, methodized our charities, and the business 
of war was referred to its proper departments, — each 
day brought its overwhelming confusion of charitable, 
military and medical suggestions, deputations and 
individuals, butchers, bakers, saddlers, gun-makers, 
wagon-masters, horse-dealers, nuns, nurses, and chap- 
lains. At one moment the eyes would fill with tears 
at some heart-breaking story, or the self-sacrificing 
ofier of some angel of light; and at the next, some 
comical or selfish proposal would chase all the tears 
away. 

The Governor's toil in these first throes of national 
anguish knew no distinction of hours, or night, or 
day. Long after midnight, or when the gas would 
blend its sickly flame with the first gray of morning, 
he would still be busy with his pen; or, if worn out 
with the night's mental labor, he would suddenly 
appear in Faneuil or some other hall, where regiment 
or company, quartered over night, and trying to sleep 
amid the tumult of wagon deliveries, and the open- 
ing of boxes, w^as hurrying on the new accoutre- 
ments and straggling into line. When he was recog- 
nized, the rousing cheer that would greet him from 



24 

the hlite-coated men, swelled his heart and took away 
all stmg from the derision which his- practical fore- 
sight had excited among those, and they are many, 
who 

" to party gave up what was meant for mankind." 

The like foresight led him, without the delay that 
less earnest and more selfish men would have con- 
sulted, to provide in advance, war stores and ord- 
nance, which were soon necessary. It is touching to 
read in some of his messages to the Legislature an 
allusion to certain expenditures made " without au- 
thority of law," but which he leaves to their candor. 

The like prescience induced him, in advance of all 
statesmen, to urge upon the IN^ational Government the 
then astonishing enrolment of six hundred thousand 
men. 

My recollections are confined to the earliest period 
of the war. What labor, assisted by his able and 
loyal aides and secretaries, he afterwards accom- 
plished, the pen of that faithful and indefatigable Ad- 
jutant General, William Schouler, eloquently tells. 
Governor Andrew's valedictory words, in praise of 
Massachusetts, have a glorious ring : " Having con- 
tributed to the army and navy, including regulars, 
volunteers, seamen and marines, men of all arms and 
officers of all grades, and of the various terms of 



25 

service, an aggregate of one hundred and fifty-nine 
thousand one hundred and sixty-four men; and having 
expended for the war out of her own treasury twenty- 
seven million seven hundred and five thousand one 
hundred and nine dollars, besides the expenditures of 
her cities and towns, she has maintained, by the un- 
failing energy and economy of her sons and daughters, 
her industry and thrift, even in the waste of war. 
She has paid promptly, and in gold, all interest on her 
bonds, including the old and the new, guarding her 
faith and honor with every public creditor, while still 
fighting the public enemy; and now, at last, in re- 
tiring from her service, I confess the satisfaction of 
having first seen all her regiments and batteries (save 
two battalions) returned and mustered out of the 
army ; and of leaving her treasury provided for by the 
fortunate and profitable negotiation of all the per- 
manent loan needed or foreseen, with her financial 
credit maintained at home and abroad, her public 
securities unsurpassed, if even equalled in value in 
the money market of the world, by those of any State 
or of the nation." 

His eyes have rested on every regiment of this 
Commonwealth. His heart has hoped and prayed 
for every soldier and sailor of the State. Every 
thrilling memory of our standards was as dear to him 
as to us. Every disappointment or complaint, every 



26 

defeat, every hope deferred, every bereavement of the 
loyal hearts which he had urged to an effort that had 
crumbled for them into despair, wounded his proud 
and sensitive nature with a sense of personal respon- 
sibility akin to reproach. Feeling, as he did, that 
the Almighty was waging this war — not that this or 
that flag might fly aloft — but for the rights of man- 
kind — for the equalization of men — the inertness of 
the public mind, the sluggishness with which govern- 
ment adopted the policy of emancipation, was pro- 
foundly saddening. But, without abating a jot of 
his assurance, he labored through darkness as if it 
were day. While Abraham Lincoln was resting his 
broad hand on the great heart of the people, and 
confidently waiting for its throb, Governor Andrew 
was crowding all the force of opinion to swell that 
heart with the purpose of emancipation. 

That, under a government of universal suffrage, 
this pure and positive man should have been continued 
in power for Rye successive years, affords both food 
for the highest hope, and for profound melancholy ; 
for hope, because we see how wise and trustful the 
people can be under a solemnizing emergency, when 
they know a momentous issue is before them; for 
melancholy, when we reflect that the social questions 
which confront us always, and on which our life as a 
representative republic depends, are not momentous 



27 



enough to prevent those contemptible jealousies of 
town, country, clique, society, or sect, which often 
compel us to pass oyer some really first-rate man 
w^ho would accept office for a noble purpose; or 
which prevent us from continuing able servants in 
power long enough to efiect that purpose. 

The labor that Governor Andrew performed, in 
the patient, lawyer-like examination and discussion 
of nearly two thousand public and private acts and 
resolves, shows what one first-rate man can do in 
legislation. Yet the nation is paying an enormous 
sum to many thousand tenth-rate legislators in the 
various States of the whole Union, to make difi'erent 
laws for a common country — though conflict of laws 
is every day becoming more and more an evil — and 
though a microscopic eye for local legislative inter- 
ests is incapable of the broad vision necessary for 
national statesmanship. 

Governor Andrew's five years of office show how 
unnecessary it is to constantly pull the safety-valve 
of annual election, provided only that Ave elect a 
servant of first-rate ability and honesty, a man grand 
enough to be trusted with power over night. The 
annual election of a governor is not only a very 
extravagant waste of time and money, but the short- 
ness of the term defeats high purpose; and a man 
without a high purpose toward some public end 



28 

ought not to be nominated. Society always has a 
momentous issue before it. The constitution is 
always moving with the spirit of the age and over- 
taking some enlarged interpretation of human rights. 
Though the interests of the State, and the develop- 
ment of the second step of the republic, demanded 
Governor Andrew's continuance in office during the 
war, there were many place-hunters in his party, 
who, at each election, thought " a new man " would 
be desirable. 'No proof is wanted that the interests 
of the State may often demand permanency, while 
the interests of place-hunters always demand change. 
For them government is not a high trust for the 
people, a vicegerency of God; but a sort of feeding- 
trough where power is to be subdivided as much as 
possible, that each aspirant may for an instant taste 
it. These small ambitions are bringing us rapidly 
face to face with a momentous issue, the power of 
petty, self-seeking men, frequently changed, to 
wisely govern voting, arm-bearing, half-educated, 
dissatisfied masses. Place-hunters cannot do it. 
The task requires men of the Andrew stamp, men 
with hearts as broad as humanity, and hands as 
strong as law. The third step of the republic, to be 
taken in our second century now before us, will test 
both the human sympathies and firmness of our 
rulers. 



29 

To have had one such Executive as John Albion 
Andrew is a hberal education in politics. A better 
understanding of the gospel spirit of our constitu- 
tion, and of the high possibilities of a republic when 
guided for a long time by intelligence, charity, honesty 
and vigor, results from a contemplation of his 
character. 

Lord Brougham closes a memoir with these words, 
which draw the heart of the New England to the 
Old : ^^ Until time shall be no more, will a test of the 
progress which our race has made in wisdom and 
virtue be derived from the veneration paid to the im- 
mortal name of Washington." In a similar spirit of 
respect to another public servant, whose work has 
been magnificently done, may it be said that the 
regard which Massachusetts pays to John Albion 
Andrew will be a test of her progress in executive 
wisdom, strength and purity. 

Grateful not merely for the service of a represen- 
tative Executive, but grateful for an example of 
intelligent democracy to the world — an example of 
the wisdom with which the people, under a deep 
sense of peril, can select, and of the safety with 
which they can, for five years of power, trust — a 
ruler so selected — we leave his ashes and his 
monument in fond, respectful hands. 

The intercession of saints is a delightful faith; 



30 

and if the blood of martyrs may avail, for every sod 
that marks a Massachusetts soldier's grave, a prayer 
ascends that the blessing of God mayfollow, through 
the mysterious path of immortality, that brave and 
generous soul, whose earthly life was ever sacred to 
liberty and the rights of mankind. 



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